ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an explanation of the triggers for advertising avoidance and presented the challenges that advertisers face in order to cope with a new breed of empowered consumers who wield their power to control how, when, or even whether they receive online advertising. However, the ease of using ad-blocking software is leaving the advertising industry, and publishers, between an ad block and a hard place. Avoidance behavior— or behavior withdrawal— is well documented by neuroscience as lateralized in the right anterior cortical regions of our brains. At the core of this spring to action is emotion, and there is substantive empirical evidence of an association between negative affective evaluation and avoidance behaviour. Advertising avoidance is an important area of research, spanning traditional media, online media and social media. Speck and Elliott investigated advertising avoidance across four media types concluding that avoidance is influenced by consumer characteristics, variables specific to the medium, as well as consumer perceptions toward the advertising.